Archive for September, 2009
Stir-on-LAN
I got Wake-on-LAN almost working on my desktop computer. It took some trial and error, but here are the essential steps:
I configured my Gigabyte S-series GA-MA790FX-DS5 motherboard BIOS to have PME Event set to enabled; this enables wake-on-LAN which means, apparently, that the NIC still receives a little bit of power in order to check for the Magic Packet. [...]
Snow Leopard, uncrashed
Knox has been having a bunch of problems upgrading his Mac to Snow Leopard. After much digging today, he discovered in the system log that startd was complaining about having to throttle cupsd from too-frequent respawning due to recurring crashes. The fix, which is described here, is to revert /etc/cups/cupsd.conf to /etc/cups/cupsd.conf.default.
How annoying that a critical service would crash on a [...]
The Power of Now
One of my pursuits these days is the cultivation of mindfulness. Life is rich and helter-skelter. Only by living in each fleeting now, it seems, is there hope of appreciating a journey that is already accelerating to its eventual conclusion. Existential crisis? Perhaps, but fairly benign as those go.
It was with some anticipation, then, that I picked up [...]
Portland to Astoria Century
This weekend a friend invited us to ride a century from Portland to Astoria with a bunch of his pals. It was a fun ride through largely new-to-me territory. Not terribly hard, though tiring in that way that centuries tend to be. We had frequent stops to re-group, a sag wagon that refilled our waters, and rides back to [...]
Why Choose This Book?
Starting from Darwin and Turing, Read Montague’s Why Choose This Book? relates recent research on how minds make decisions. The critical element is a valuation mechanism that can assign weights to various alternatives, and do so cheaply. Why, indeed, does a computer heat up so much while our own more complex brains are barely warm?
The book deals with an interesting [...]
